Renee Ricciardi

Renée Ricciardi is a Boston based artist and photographer. She received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and was the 2013 Morton Godine Travel Fellowship recipient. She has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions in Boston and Sicily, Italy. Renée has delivered artist talks in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Milan, and Venice. In 2015, she was selected as one of the Vermont Center of Photography’s 30 artists under the age of 30. Renée is currently working on a personal assignment photographing apiaries, beekeepers, and organic food in cities across Italy. Today we take a look at Renée’s series titled Bees in Italy.

Bees in Italy

“There is an unspoken equilibrium between the bee and the keeper, a mutual trust and a mutual tension. The natural world is bendable and malleable and as an artist I seek to find when and how the natural world can or cannot be tamed or manipulated.

I explore balance by photographing the relationship between honeybees and beekeepers. As a beekeeper myself, the consequences of pesticides on bee populations is particularly devastating.

Italy marked a historic moment with a ban on a pesticide that is linked as a factor in causing massive honeybee deaths. Since honeybees pollinate our food supply, a world without them would not produce enough food to sustain life.

This series was made over a span of six months, while traveling alone throughout fourteen regions of Italy and living with the beekeepers, whose work is both humble and colossal.”